ABSTRACT This article situates the recent concept of ‘sharenting’ in relation to the literature on the ‘parenting culture’. Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the ecstatic is then introduced and used as a lens through which to understand and critique this contemporary parenting culture. The discussion that follows covers: ways in which social media contribute to the development of new iterations of the individual subject and their relationship to parenting culture; the congruence between those forms of subjectivity and Baudrillard’s notion of the (...) ecstatic; and the resulting notion of ecstatic parenting. (shrink)

This research illustrates dangers inherent in the gap created when organizations decouple ethics program adoption from implementation. Using a sample of 182 professionals in the pharmaceutical and financial services industries, we examine the relationship between structural decoupling of formal ethics programs and individual-level perceptions and behavior. Findings strongly support the hypothesized relationships between decoupling and organizational members’ legitimacy perceptions of the ethics program, psychological contract breach, organizational cynicism, and unethical behavior.

Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives the familiar issues of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation a fresh appraisal, with particular reference to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides. All Greek quotations are translated.

The Ellsberg Paradox documented the aversion to ambiguity in the probability of winning a prize. Using an original sample of 266 business owners and managers facing risks from climate change, this paper documents the presence of departures from rationality in both directions. Both ambiguity-seeking behavior and ambiguity-averse behavior are evident. People exhibit ‘fear’ effects of ambiguity for small probabilities of suffering a loss and ‘hope’ effects for large probabilities. Estimates of the crossover point from ambiguity aversion (fear) to ambiguity seeking (...) (hope) place this value between 0.3 and 0.7 for the risk per decade lotteries considered, with empirical estimates indicating a crossover mean risk of about 0.5. Attitudes toward the degree of ambiguity also reverse at the crossover point. (shrink)

This article attempts to account for professional historians’ relative neglect of the history of economic life over the past thirty years, looking mainly at the American case. This neglect seems paradoxical, considering the remarkable transformations that have taken place in world capitalism during this same period. I trace the neglect to the capture of the once interdisciplinary field of economic history by mathematically inclined economists and to the roughly simultaneous turn of historians from social to cultural history. I conclude by (...) suggesting some topics in the history of economic life that seem both timely and exciting. I also suggest some intellectual resources that other disciplines, particularly economic sociology and economic history, could offer should historians decide to tackle the history of economic life once again. (shrink)

We argue for a discursive ethic of surveillancethat accounts for the paradoxes that thephenomenon presents to today's organisationalmembers. We first we develop a genealogy ofprivacy and illustrate its relation tosurveillance, focusing on the antinomianrelationship between the public and private. Then we review the common ethicaltensions that arise in today's technologicallyintensive workplace. Lastly, we develop acritical approach to the ethical status ofprivacy and surveillance – a micro-ethics – that remains open todiscursively-based negotiation by those whofind themselves at the verypoint of scrutiny.

Marxian education scholars have successfully established critical media literacy as a specific response to concerns about contemporary media's problems and possibilities with regard to youth. This development has made a significant contribution to the intersection of media, critical theory, and pedagogy. Yet, the theoretical foundations of critical media literacy limit its capacity to confront the trajectory of contemporary media and communication technologies. Here, Kip Kline offers Jean Baudrillard's media theory as a possible corrective to the undertheorization of media at the (...) level of form that contributes to the inefficacy of critical media literacy. (shrink)

How we select, prepare, and support teachers has become a surprisingly common topic among journalists, politicians, and policymakers. Contemporary recommendations on teaching and teachers, whatever their intentions, fail to assess this deeply human activity from its historical roots. In _The Teaching Instinct: Explorations Into What Makes Us Human_, Kip Téllez invites us to reappraise teaching through a wide lens and argues that our capacity to teach is one part culture, two parts genetic. By rescuing the field of instinct psychology from (...) the margins, this challenging book explores topics as diverse as teaching in other species, teaching across human cultures, and the development of teaching in young children, finally drawing readers into a discussion about how our teaching instinct influences modern teacher learning, selection, and preparation. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as comparative biology, evolutionary psychology, and teacher education policy, Téllez warns us that ignoring or contradicting our teaching instinct results in unhappy teachers and dysfunctional school systems. (shrink)

Rational Risk Policy is based on Viscusi's Arne Ryde Memorial Lectures, delivered at Lund University in 1996. The organizing principle of these lectures is that the irrationality of individual decisions is often embodied in government regulations. Rather than overcoming the inadequacies in individual risk beliefs and behaviour, governmental regulations often institutionalize them. Viscusi examines how consumers and workers perceive risk and the implications of these risk beliefs and behavioural responses to risk for government policy. Hazard warnings efforts, direct regulation, and (...) liability are among the alternative modes of intervention. The role of risk tradeoffs with respect to the value of life as well as the consequences of wasteful regulatory expenditures are considered in a discussion of riskrisk analysis. Rational Risk Policy also includes a critique of the risk analysis practices used by government agencies as well as a consideration of how liability and social insurance should be integrated into a rational risk management strategy. (shrink)

Are the risks of smoking exaggerated? Has there been an open and rational discussion about the risks of smoking? This book attempts to answer these and many other questions about smoking. It provides a detailed empirical presentation on smoking behavior as a risky consumer decision. Using new empirical data based on several national and regional surveys, Viscusi addresses several issues, including: the sources of information that people have about the risks of smoking, the accuracy of their perceptions of risks associated (...) with smoking, and the consistency of smoking decisions with other risky behavior--scrutinizing issues such as whether smokers value risk differently than those who wear safety belts. Viscusi also looks at the differences in age groups and how they assess these risks based on public information. He provides new insight into the degree to which individuals understand smoking risks and take these risks into account in their smoking behavior. With its detailed empirical data and its examination of individual decision-making processes, this work will interest researchers in public health, public policy analysis, psychology, and economics, as well as anyone concerned with this important issue. (shrink)

Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film examines the troubling effects of American cinema's portrayal of youth with Jean Baudrillard's radical social theory and philosophical system.

This essay argues that in constraining travel to specific motorized vehicles, the Interstate Highway System’s transportation hegemony alienates humans from both mythic and existential dimensions of lived experience. By separating humans from encountering the environment through their indigenous connection to the earth, their feet, the highway system alienates them from what it means to dwell intersubjectively in a place. This alienation includes the loss of cultural memory rooted in place: the emptying of meaning that mythic symbolism and rituals create in (...) habituating humans to dwelling in place. Freeway alienation severs human cooperation with the constituents of the environment that is necessary for creatively maintaining a healthy mutual habitat. (shrink)

This article explores the contrast of pilgrimage and tourism as sacred and profane journeys using Disney World and the Camino de Santiago as exemplars of such destinations. An entanglement of place structures reveals Disney World as a quasi-religious journey site for some whose tourist actions implicate a ritual centered on capitalist mythology. Disentangling sacred encounters and profane experiences demonstrates the role such places play in elevating community versus self-indulgence.

The following quotations describe in “nutshells” a few highlights of John Archibald Wheeler's contributions to physics. The contributions are arranged in roughly the following order: (i) concrete research results, (ii) innovative ideas that have become foundations for the research of others, (iii) insights that give guidance for the development of physics over the coming decades. Since most of Wheeler's work contains strong elements of two or even all three of these characteristics, the editors have not attempted to delineate the dividing (...) lines between the three categories. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging collection of essays on origins, mathematician Granville Sewell looks at the big bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, and the evolution of life. He concludes that while there is much in the history of life that seems to suggest natural causes, there is nothing to support Charles Darwin’s idea that natural selection of random mutations can explain major evolutionary advances. Sewell explains why evolution is a fundamentally different and much more difficult problem than (...) others solved by science, and why increasing numbers of scientists are now recognizing what has long been obvious to the layman, that there is no explanation possible without design. This book summarizes many of the traditional arguments for intelligent design, but presents some powerful new arguments as well. (shrink)

Optimal protective responses to long-term risks depend on rational perceptions of ambiguous risks and uncertain time horizons. Our study examined the joint influence of uncertain delay and risk in an original sample of business owners and managers. We found that many subjects disliked uncertainty in the timing of an outcome, a reaction we term ``lottery timing risk aversion.'' Such aversion to uncertain timing was positively related to aversion to ambiguous probabilities for lotteries involving storm damage risks. This association suggests that (...) uncertainty may be processed similarly in both the risk and time dimensions. (shrink)

In their effort to emphasize the positive role of nature in our lives, environmental thinkers have tended to downplay or even to ignore the negative aspects of our experience with nature and, even when acknowledging them, have had little to offer by way of psychologically and spiritually productive ways of dealing with them. The idea that the experience of value begins with the experience of existential shame—arising from awareness of the limitations that define the self—needs to be explored. The primary (...) purpose of the “technologies of the imagination”—myth, symbol, ritual and the arts—is to provide a passage through this shame to the experience of values such as community, meaning, beauty, and the sacred and, through these experiences, to inscribe them into conscience. The implications of this idea for environmental thinking and practice can be explored in two areas involving strong engagement with nature: ecological restoration and the production and eating of food. An environmentalism that fails to provide productive ways of dealing with existential shame may well prove inadequate to the task of providing means for achieving a healthy, sustain­able relationship between humans and the rest of nature. (shrink)

The breadth-first search adopted by Bayesian researchers to map out the conceptual space and identify what the framework can do is beneficial for science and reflective of its collaborative and incremental nature. Theoretical pluralism among researchers facilitates refinement of models within various levels of analysis, which ultimately enables effective cross-talk between different levels of analysis.